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So it’s hardly surprising that Common Core, the tough set of academic standards embraced by 45 states plus the District of Columbia, has been met with disparate pockets of resistance—from the understandable concerns of some parents and teachers to the false narrative of a federal takeover.

Last week, the United States got a painful reminder that making student achievement a higher priority couldn’t be more urgent when a major global study ranked American kids just 17th in reading, 21st in science, and 26th in math—behind countries such as Estonia, Poland and Vietnam.

The rankings, compiled by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, ought to be a wakeup call. The United States made no improvement from previous years, while other countries leapfrogged us by dramatically improving their students’ proficiency levels.

We simply can’t afford to remain stagnant. American children are just as capable as those around the world, and every child regardless of color or class is capable of achieving at high levels.

That’s where Common Core comes in. Inside those PISA results was another sobering reminder of our need to set high standards for the set of skills and knowledge we aim to teach our kids. Even within our own country, students’ performance varies wildly.

Consider Massachusetts, America’s top performing-state according to national assessments. On their own, Massachusetts’s 15-year-olds would rank 6th in the world in reading. In math, 19 percent of Massachusetts students achieved PISA’s “level 5” proficiency (out of six levels) compared with just 9 percent of all American students—more than twice as many. In science, the difference was 14 percent compared with 7 percent. There’s a clear discrepancy in the quality of education being offered in public schools from state to state.

If we zoom in closer still, we even see a troubling picture within Massachusetts’ overall scores: student performance continues to vary greatly from city to city, district to district, and school to school. Even in Massachusetts there remains an unacceptably wide achievement gap between white students and children of color.

Correcting for that inequity among schoolchildren is exactly what Common Core seeks to do. A student in Wyoming might have done all of her homework and even earned straight As in math but could transfer to a school in Georgia and find herself a year behind her peers in terms of what she’s expected to know. Worse still, she might graduate high school and enroll in college unprepared for the demanding coursework. The result is that too many of our children are not being adequately prepared to compete in an increasingly global economy.